Smol Earth in five cold points
------------------------------
Still ridin' this thought train, sorry! Last post on this topic
for several months, I'd wager.
The impetus comes, once again, from adiabatic's scrawlspace[1], where
on 2024-04-24 they wrote "something of an exploration on how the
smol.earth crowd is at least onto something, even though (it seems)
I’m diving in deep into one aspect of a ten- or twenty-point
desiderata list and ignoring all the rest". I'm responding mostly
here to the subtle jibe that, yeah, Smol Earth *is* kind of a pile
of loosely related points without much in the way of really explicit
connections or underlying principles or priorities or anything.
I mean, sometimes a project just has to be that way (I guess?),
but it can't hurt to really knuckle down and try for a kind of
minimum description length summary, right?
I sat down to try this and was genuinely astonished to seemingly
succeed in a successful in a five point list of goals:
1. To spread awareness that what society has taken to broadly
referring to as "tech" has a non-trivial ecological footprint
and that the footprint is growing, not shrinking, even though
individual devices consume less energy with each generation.
This is underappreciated. It is possible to make too big of
a deal out of this relative to other things (and maybe I do),
but people are by and large not as aware of this as they are of
the footprint of electricity, cars, steaks, etc. People often
propose large deployments of more tech as a solution to various
other environmental problems without a shred of cognitive
dissonance.
2. To shine a light on and amplify the voices of and otherwise do
good things to/for those computer people who have already taken
strong notice of tech's ecological footprint and have reacted
mostly by championing greener computers and leaner
software/protocols, longer device lifespans, more repairability
and reusability, etc. They are a part of the solution.
3. To suggest that reforming devices and software alone is only
one part of the solution and that computing less is an equally
important part, and to try to get the people above thinking and
talking about this, too. Changing from using a 10W computer for
4 hours per day to using that same 10W computer for 2 hours per
day saves just as much energy as changing to using a 5W computer
for the same 4 hours per day. Changing to using a 5W computer for 2
hours per day saves even more energy.
4. In acknowledgement that point 3. is a hard sell for computer
folk who tend to think of computers as good and fun and powerful and
efficient and always making life better and easier, to encourage a
robust discussion of what personal computing is actually used for,
how much good it does, how much harm it does, when non-computing
alternatives are "good enough", etc. We want to give a voice
to technically literate people with reasonable arguments for why
computing less does not necessarily make life miserable.
5. In acknowledgement that changing from computing for 4 hours per
day to computing for 2 hours per day requires you to find something
else to do for 2 hours per day, to suggest that it's a good idea to
go outside and touch grass. This is not logically necessary from
the above: if you start using 2 hours per day to sit inside with
the curtains drawn learning to play the piano or studying religious
scripture or painting watercolours of your unused computers, that
is an ecological win. But engaging with nature introduces the
possibility of positive feedback loops, where the time you spend
not computing reinforces your conviction and motivation to both
reform and reduce the time you do spend computing.
That's it! Smol Earth is about figuring out ways to use computers
and networks which achieve the above goals as well as possible,
are as philosophically consistent with the beliefs under-pinning
those goals (plus those which arising from trying to achieve them)
as possible, and which maximise the formation of feedback loops
between these points. That really is it. Everything else I've
written about it is either me failing to cleanly separate the above
from my much wider and wilder personal eco-philosophy from which
the above was born but is not actually fundamentally dependent upon,
me trying to justify or explain or motivate the points above without
stating them clearly in isolation first, me having mentally already
run a few kilometres down the path that *I* think these goals point
toward and found shiny things and confused them as the beginning
of the path when they are not and the actual beginning is clearer,
or else just me spitballing a whole lot of ideas for things people
might like to try to in service of the goals above as a substitute
for a clear list of desiderata.
Immediately after writing these five points, I felt really
accomplished. But reading them again later...while they are a pretty
darn accurate account of the core goals that lead me to conceive the
project, they somehow leave me feeling really cold. In separating
those goals from the crazy Infinite Zeno-Steppin' March to the Stone
Age philosophy which lead me to form them - and I really do think
it's a good idea to separate them from that - I've also removed
any and all hint whatsoever of deeper meaning, higher purpose,
hearts-and-minds, geeky-green-identity-crisis-soul-searching.
It's too utilitarian a framing. In short, I've over-corrected here,
I think.
Nevertheless, these last three posts as a whole have felt
tremendously fruitful for me. I've come away with a much clearer
understanding of how many of the various ideas swirling around
in my head relate to one another. I'm ready to launch into yet
another round of refining the "About Us" document, confident that
it'll be refining with clear goals, not just endless tweaking.
I'm slowly homing in on something, and can't wait to eventually
sink my teeth into it. But as promised in the opening paragraph,
I'll leave this be for now. Tune in next week for, I dunno, more
obscure 90s Japanese music content, or something.
